I won’t be getting stirred up over the TikTok spoon-boiling craze

Afew weeks ago, I finally plucked up the courage and went in … to the shadowy place at the back of the fridge where no hand ever goes. To be clear, our fridge is quite clean, relatively speaking: nothing oozes in its salad crisper; no cheese rind awaits death in the place where the butter lives. But the top shelf, where I keep jars, open but not yet empty, was becoming overcrowded.

Two hours later, the dishwasher was full of jars, and the bin full of their (mostly unrecognisable) contents – a satisfying morning’s work, and one that got me thinking about what else in the kitchen I might profitably clean. What I absolutely did not consider, however, was joining the crowd by boiling my wooden spoons. I’m the child of a microbiologist. I hold to the notion that, broadly speaking, wood is naturally antibacterial. I’ve had the same chopping board for more than 15 years, and I’ve only ever wiped it with a damp, soapy cloth. No one has died so far.

The creepy trend for boiling spoons – it is said to result in gruesome excretions – began on TikTok. A woman in the US called Lulaboo Jenkins posted a video of a ritual spoon-boiling that has been watched by 49 million people. I read about this, and even as I rolled my eyes, I recognised it as yet another sign of the strange state we are in. Our attitude to hygiene, and dirt in all its forms, is increasingly strange and stupid. Every city street is strewn with fast food wrappers. But while this seems to induce no disgust whatsoever in most people, much of the rest of life induces rank nausea. Still, we struggle to convince people to eat items past their sell-by date. Still, people cannot deal with food that has not been ruthlessly sanitised.

Fish must be decapitated, and meat wrapped in clingfilm; shoppers favour potatoes with no traces of soil. Something tells me the spoonboilers are the same people who are timid to the point of phobic when it comes to the prospect of mould. It’s all highly paradoxical. What they cannot see does not disturb them. But equally, what is invisible is also borderline terrifying.

But back to wooden spoons

– and all things wooden. I love an aged wooden spoon; they are more aesthetically pleasing than new (or boiled) ones. I’m always on the hunt for ancient bread boards.

I own an old bread knife with a wooden handle, on which are written the words “Manners makyth man”. The first “m” is almost missing now, the victim of several generations of thumbs. Using it makes me feel happy and grounded: ed: the kind of person who couldn’t care are less about a few germs.